Social practice & everyday texts

Revisiting Stillar: “Everyday texts are ubiquitous and play a significant role in our exchanges with others in social life. Their complexity and their consequences, however, do not often receive close critical attention. No matter how mundane we may take these types of texts to be, they all:

Exhibit complexity in terms of the linguistic resources we draw upon to make and understand them

Perform critical rhetorical functions for the participants involved

Powerfully summon and propagate the social orders in which we live

In each case, the text is an impetus for our active response.

[Paraphrasing Katie] Everyday texts are constitutive of something or someone; as agents of communication, they surround us constantly, and it is surely to our benefit to be able to understand what they’re saying

Social practice:

A method that studies the link between practice and context within social situations

A routinized type of behavior

Materials – including things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made

Competences – which encompasses skill, know-how and technique

Meanings – in which we include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations.